Clandestine Truth
by Mikanis
Summary: I wish that I could keep you in a precious Chinese box, On Sundays I would pray for you so it would never stop, I'd love to hear you laugh tonight, I'd love to hear you weep, I'd love to listen to you while you're screaming in your sleep! BxMello MATURE
1. Clandestine

AN- Well, hello there. Oo

_(I'd love to take you home with me and tuck you into bed  
I'd love to see what makes you tick inside your pretty head)_

_**STOP!**_

THIS IS **NOT** A NICE FIC! THIS IS YOUR ONLY WARNING!

_(I wish that I could keep you in a precious Chinese box  
On Sundays I would pray for you so it would never stop)_

**NOT NICE! This is like NOTHING I have previously written.**

_(I'd love to hear you laugh tonight, I'd love to hear you weep  
I'd love to listen to you while you're screaming in your sleep)_

See...what you THINK you're getting into is maybe a tension scene or two, maybe some dark smut, but you're _wrong_!

_(I'd love to soothe you with my voice and take your hand in mine  
I'd love to take you past the stars and out of reach of time)_

I don't write Smut.

But I do intend to scare the hell out of you with this story.

Consider yourselves warned.

_(I'd love to see inside your mind, to tear it all apart  
To cut you open with a knife and find your sacred heart)_

Beta-Nilahxapiel, as a favor.

-Playing with Beyond Birthday is like baiting a fucking spider. This entire ficlet will only be 5-7 chapters long, if I can help it. It will be dark, morbid, and I'm going to do my best to fuck with your head. So, come on kids, gimme the stick and lets watch its legs uncurl...-

Wanna to hear what inspired it?

Lyrics belong to Danny Elfman and Oingo Boingo-Insanity. (www.youtube .com/watch?vsROhhid5CB4)

Reviews welcome. Step Lightly.

_(I'd love to take your satin dolls and tear them all to shreds  
I'd love to mess your pretty hair, I'd love to see you **dead**.)_

XXXX

Oh.

And uh...gird your loins.

XXXX

Chapter 1

_Clandestine -Kept or done in secret, often in order to conceal an illicit or improper purpose._

XXXX

B merely watched. It was the red head that sought the white child's company, and the blond would follow him. Once they'd found him, they'd both be ignored, and interestingly enough, they never seemed to mind. The red head merely enjoyed annoying the white child, and the other two loathed each other…yet they shared company like the thickest of thieves, each set to amuse himself in their respective corners of the triangle.

They brought children's things, the red and white, things like handheld gaming panels and blocks and action figures. Things one might see in any normal child's hands. The struggle for some illusion of normalcy turned B's stomach. They were gifted, beyond gifted, and yet they strove to lower themselves to the common standing of mere children in their free time because it alleviated the stress of their work.

The yellow child did not.

And it was this child that drew B's attention, when he'd look from his seat in the window and pretend that the world beyond that glass-paneled view did not exist. Often, he was so lost in his thoughts when they entered that it was far too late to tell them to leave when he finally acknowledged their presence. He didn't watch so openly in the beginning, warily marking the figures in the corners of his peripheral vision, but they were, without a doubt, the focus of his vast mind. It was a rarity, but sometimes one of the boys would lift their heads from their quiet endeavors and watch him back. He cut a startling image, hollowed out by the bookshelf, covered in the firelight. The shadows made his eyes glitter on the few and far occasions that he did look directly back at them. It was usually enough to murder their curiosity and send them back to their own minds. Dimly conscious and deeply aware, he watched as the weeks passed, and what at first were mere intruders to his place of solace soon became his frequent, indirect sources of entertainment. He refused to lower himself and call them companions.

The yellow child's hair glowed in the firelight.

It was small things such as this that drew his attention inexorably from his snowy landscape, until he could scarce look in any other direction. He often settled for staring straight ahead, his knees drawn up and arms about his chin as he studied the boy from the corner of his eye.

He read.

He was always reading.

Always.

The others wasted their time on mind-numbing tasks, building a fort of plastic, and moving pixels across a small screen, but he read. Silent and patiently, he turned his pages, and absorbed the words scribed upon them. Had B any notion of respect and its meaning, he might have held the yellow child in slightly higher regard…but instead, his thinly veiled contempt merely marked that he was not as stupid as the other two. The white one stretched upon the floor, letting a toy airplane hover in his hands and watching its flight with eyes as dark as B's own. The red child leaned upon the chair's arm, his back to the yellow one's side. It was almost comical how he assumed the submissive position when he was comfortable, but pulled his companion about by a blind lead when he wasn't.

…And the yellow one sat within confines of the large armchair and availed himself of the fire's warmth and the quiet company, with the air of someone doing something worth while.

Sometimes he would sit properly, his boots upon the floor where they belonged. Sometimes, he would come without shoes or sock, and curl his legs about him like a cat, exuding the same feline air of lazy indulgence, but regardless of how he chose to occupy it; the chair was always where B's eyes were drawn. When the fire glistened brighter in the midnight hours, a momentary batch of sap found within the depth of its fuel, it would hum and whistle and spit sparks, and the light would dance through his air like it belonged there, bright and golden and ethereal….

B was content to watch, and deny his interest blindly within his own mind.

Every evening for four months, they found their way to the library. It was a novel thing, in reality, because while they continued to intrude, they never seemed interested in beating B to the room. He followed the same routine that he always did, with minor variations for other people's incompetence, and then he retired to this room to wile away the hours before he felt tired enough to attempt sleep. Four months they'd crept in after him, talking quietly up the stair well, and falling silent upon reaching the door. Perhaps they were merely afraid to disturb him, B didn't know, but without fail, they entered while he was gone, so that when he finished a turn of thought and pulled himself from his reverie, they appeared there in the floor, arranged as always and silently amusing themselves.

It was movement that drew his attention from the stark wooden panel of the bookshelf he was staring at the night it changed. The snow was finally beginning to clear from the moor, and he relished the last vestiges of the winter chill emanating from the glass at his side. He wasn't sure at first what had pulled his eyes, but then the yellow one shifted again, drawing his other leg to accompany the first.

Beyond watched the smooth movement despite himself. Aside from the occasional shift from the white child, they didn't move very often.

When the yellow child lifted his gaze from his book to meet Beyond's eyes, the air in his chest locked, freezing tightly in place. He'd never seen his eyes before…they must have been a very light color…very light, grey or blue perhaps, because in the glow of the hearth, they were as yellow as a cat's stare. The red tinge in the corner of his eyes flashed, and his name flickered above his head. Beyond tried not to memorize it.

He held the yellow child's eyes for a long time, contemplating the wisdom of such a thing. They held his attention easily, however…the white child had dark eyes, too much like _his_ to interest Beyond. The red child was an Irish blooded boy, with dark brown eyes. His eyes, however…the fire danced in them, and that was possibly the most fascinating thing Beyond had ever seen.

The boy dropped the stare first, of course, returning to his pages of solace, but the set of his shoulders spoke of new tension. He stayed too long upon his page, and slowly, so slowly, a smile began to tug at the corners of Beyond's mouth. It seemed a nearly foreign thing, but the idea he was entertaining was ludicrous enough to smirk at. No, it was simply just a notion, a tattered scrap of possibility that he turned over carefully in the limbo of his subconscious.

He didn't have to wait long. Almost surreptitiously, the bright eyes moved from their page again to capture Beyond in their peripheral vision. He didn't move, knowing that the shadows would hide his waiting expression as well as any motion he made would only betray it. With bated breath, he found himself tensing most exquisitely, the muscles along his spine and arms flexing of their own accord at the prospect of meeting that ember's gaze again. It seemed a waste of adrenaline.

But it was worth the smug curl of pleasure he gained when the boy lost his battle finally, and lifted his head a fraction to find Beyond still staring at him.

He could see the pace of his breathing quicken, and his smirk widened even further.

Contact, pure and uncomplicated. The shadows danced across his features at the whim of the hearth, and Beyond watched those too. The moonlight shifted, dancing out from behind the cloud cover and bathing Beyond himself in silver, and the fire…the fire caught his eyes just perfectly, he could feel it. Awash in the soft blue tone of the moon, his strange eyes trapped the light and burned crimson.

The boy blinked once, glancing between his words and the figure in the window. Beyond merely tilted his head forward and rested it on his chin, watching him openly now.

After several tried and failed attempts to return to his book, the golden child finally gave up and retired early.

XXXX

There was a spider building a web in his curtains. Beyond watched the tiny thing quietly working above him and wished that all human kind could learn to move with such silence and grace. They'd be much more enjoyable company if they could only learn to function without making any noise at all. Perhaps his bolt of irritation stemmed from the fact that for the first time in the months they'd been coming to the library, the boys were speaking quietly to his left. The moon highlighted the tiny insect swaying between the folds of white gauze in the window frame, and snatches of conversation drifted to him over the roar of the fire. Phrases like 'ice cream', 'midnight', and 'unguarded' tumbled quietly from the red child's lips in a defensive whisper. He seemed to be trying to coax the other two into a raid on the kitchens, and while he was certainly quiet, he was also breaking the more intense quiet Beyond had been enjoying only moments ago.

He wished the fucking boy would shut up.

At the end of his camaraderie speech, the red child instead found himself going to the kitchens alone while the white child went to bed. He watched (but didn't), the figures move towards the door, concentrating intently on his silent friend overhead and waiting for the triumphant click of the door closing.

It wasn't until the extended pause that he realized all was not going according to his fevered wishes, and the damn voice came back, slightly louder to be heard from across the room.

"Mello, aren't you coming?"

Mello.

The spider blurred in his sight while the cognitive gears of his mind stole the word and ran away to a dark haven with it.

Slowly, he let his gaze slip to the side, watching the boys from the mere slit of his eyes, lips slightly parted in blank surprise. The golden child remained in his chair, gloved fingers splaying a book wide upon his knee like a martyr while the other hand waved the noise off. A sneer curled his lip then, because he knew that the golden child was intelligent enough to read and carry on three conversations at the same time without dropping a train of thought…surely he wasn't-

A single, furtive upward glance.

A lie.

The red child hovered in the doorway a moment more before sighing and closing it after him. The affected pout didn't seem to reach either of the two figures as they remained frozen in place, even when the boy waited in the hall for another handful of seconds to be sure that his tag-along was truly abandoning him this time. Beyond could see the glimmer of color in his eyes held as they strayed to the door, and the contrast of relief and tension in his frame when the other boy's steps finally echoed down the stairs in defeat.

He'd stayed.

Pretentious little bastard.

Slowly, those eyes, those bright, golden eyes lifted from the book he'd ignored and met Beyond's. The older boy turned his head finally, spider momentarily forgotten in the wake of the notion that again tickled the underside of his conscious thoughts. It was a dark thing, a quiet muttering that it was in his best interest to ignore.

He'd lied to his friend, after a manner…pretending to be absorbed in his reading material so that he would have a moment alone with Beyond. It suddenly made him paranoid to wonder how long the golden child had been watching _him_ watch the _spider_.

As though to answer his unspoken musings, a slow smirk spread across the boy's face.

Beyond merely narrowed his eyes.

The smirk disappeared.

As though on cue, the footsteps returned, pounding up the stairwell again.

"Mello!" The door swung open, and the red child stood in its wake, irritated. "Come with me, man…this place is fucking creepy after everyone goes to bed."

They remained locked in their stare for a moment monger before the golden child faltered, closing his book and muttering breathlessly, "Yes, I'm coming."

The idea returned, flaring in the recesses of his brain like an ember, and in the wake of the lost contact, Beyond turned his eyes back to his lovely insect and refused to acknowledge the boys as they left him alone in the firelight.

XXXX

The scent of chocolate.

Something had changed, he was sure. Still in the recesses of his thoughts, it was hard to focus on the room as he pulled his eyes from the wooden grain directly ahead. The sun was setting in the sky still, and due to their…habitual schedule, the boys weren't due until after the last traces of orange were gone and the only light remaining was the fire. The attendant had come and come some half hour ago, kindling the warmth and glow in the stone hollow beneath the mantle, but Beyond had barely stirred from his place. He wasn't even sure the woman had noticed him, curled like a panther in his little window bench.

The scent, not of burning wood, but of chocolate.

It didn't belong, his mind whispered, something was different, something was wrong.

When the bookshelf finally came into focus and he had the strength of will to move again, he didn't. Instead of tensing and allowing his instinctive violence to take over, he carefully turned his eyes to the side and waited for the anomaly to approach him…a year or so ago, he'd injured a small child that startled him out of his thoughts too quickly.

It appeared in the form of a dark blur, dark clothing and pale skin; and the miniscule movements of someone unwrapping a parcel. Once he determined that they were not within physical reach, Beyond turned his head, crimson eyes wide and unwholesomely ringed. At this point, he hardly needed to apply the make up to look like _him_ anymore.

The golden child…Mello…eased into his chair with a bored expression upon his face, a bar of candy in one small fist. Beyond almost sneered at it, but then thought of his jam and allowed that everyone had their vices. The boy was carefully avoiding his eyes, as he rested his book upon a knee and bent to unlace his boots. The chocolate was a rich scent, hanging between his teeth as he worked the unnecessarily heavy shoes off, setting them to the side. Beyond was mildly surprised when he then lifted the hem of his pants and the hiss of Velcro disturbed his quiet even further. A small black band of fabric settled heavily into the discarded boots. 'Ankle weights' his mind supplied a second later as the golden child lithely stretched both of his legs and then curled them up into the chair.

Curiosity, Beyond supposed, is what brought him early. Perhaps for a glimpse of him in better lighting, perhaps to have his moment alone with the most frightening figure in the orphanage, it didn't matter. Beyond watched the golden child watch him, and found that he preferred the darker light of the fire to the pure sunlight that lit his hair now. The sunlight seemed less…enlivened. He found himself wondering if the boy had intended to impress him with his show of physical prowess by removing the weights in his presence. The idea was laughable…Beyond could probably throw Mello across the room.

He caught himself addressing him by name and frowned.

He turned back to his spider only to find that someone had cleared away its web during the course of the week, and felt another pang of irritation. Humans couldn't leave well enough alone.

XXXX

When he next pulled his mind together, an hour or so had passed. A quick glance showed that the golden boy's intense stare hadn't faltered any time recently, but his attention had. He sat with his eyes half closed, drowsily hooded against the firelight. Beyond cocked his head slightly to see it better, but he refused to turn towards the boy and alert him to the fact that he was once again himself. He could hear the other two coming up the stairs, talking quietly again, and almost as soon as the sound reached him, the golden child jumped, his eyes wide.

Beyond gave him a blank look, and glanced back towards the door as the other two entered. They must have taken it as a sign of his foul mood that he addressed them so soon, because the conversation immediately died with a soft clearing of the throat and the click and shift of toys in the white child's arms. They closed the door quietly, and he craned his back to rest upon his chin, still irritated about his missing spider. While he'd hardly been fond of the insect, it was something he could focus on. Something to ease the monotony of their presence, and help him slip back into his state of nothing.

He was tempted to call it meditation, but he garnered no peace from it, and so instead called it only his 'cessation of thought'. It had been difficult at first, but he found that learning how to 'not think' helped keep a clamp on the urges that sometimes nudged at his soul. Unhealthy things, the backwash of his training and his intense resentment of his benefactor. They were a common sentiment in the orphanage, though he was quite sure that no one else had experienced the negative side effects of their mental stress quite like he had.

He was almost positive that no one else had come to…enjoy it.

Still, regardless of his unique and possibly freakish tactics for handling his work, he found that no matter what he intended, his body would rest but his mind would not. It had become necessary to impose this form of stasis upon himself for his own safety, as well as those around him. He had a tendency to become rather irrational when he wasn't rested.

He was not sure how long he was gone the second time around, nor again what drew him back. There wasn't a sound to be heard, or any unnecessary movement from the boys at his side. The white one lay stretched upon the small sofa directly before the fire, and was in the process of blocking himself in, using both pillows and plastic squares. The red child sat against the sofa front tonight, instead of beside Mello's chair. The game system and its headphones glistened silver in the light and that seemed to be the extent of his world…until Beyond realized just how his chest shivered faintly with every indrawn breath. It was enough to make him turn his head, because he'd once witnessed a young girl have an asthma attack, and it had turned his stomach to watch her turn blue until someone called the team and she was rushed to hospital wing. Silent, he pulled his thoughts together, and with a clear, calculating mind, watched the red child for the next few minutes.

He already had a reputation of being around when the terrible things happened. It was not a luck card that he favored in his hand.

The white child, upon closer inspection, was actually half asleep behind his fortress wall, curled around a pillow and warily dozing as the minutes passed. Beyond doubted the boy trusted any of them enough to fall completely asleep in their presence. His eyes shifted to the one upon the floor, at the way his knees were partially drawn up, and his eyes stared unblinkingly at the small screen. From his angle, he could tell that the device had been paused, and the game halted to save his progress, and for a moment it didn't make sense.

Then an all too familiar tension began creeping into his frame, and as Beyond watched, unnoticed in the sidelines, the young gamer licked his lips and then surreptitiously flicked his dark eyes upwards.

…Drawing Beyond's attention to Mello for the first time since collecting the pieces of his mind.

The golden child sat curled up as comfortably as possible in the chair adjacent to the small sofa. The firelight glinted off the silver wraps of his boots, but that was not where the red boy's eyes were resting.

For a moment, he didn't see it, narrowing his eyes against the shadows and glancing between the taut frame upon the floor and the picture of calm upon the chair. The golden boy held his book open on his knee, forefinger and small finger splaying the pages open over the spine, and his chocolate hovered comfortably in reach of his mouth. His light eyes moved back and forth quickly, a small furrow at his brow a sign of his concentration. There seemed to be nothing amiss. Then, just as Beyond was prepared to write it off and slip away again, Mello tilted his head slightly to the side and took the point of the chocolate between his lips. He withdrew it slowly before taking it back, mouthing the candy to melt it against his patient tongue and teeth. A habit, Beyond supposed, but another visible shiver in the red child stopped the blood in his veins as he reconsidered his appraisal of the boys before him.

Not children.

Not quite, at least.

The notion of a sexual tension in one of them was so foreign that it caught Beyond completely off-guard, but there it was before his eyes. His arms loosed about his knees as he turned to take in the scene more clearly.

The gamer was staring at his unmoving screen again, lips pressed tightly together. The golden child continued about his way, completely oblivious to his companion's plight, but as the red one looked up again in time to see the dark candy disappear, a helpless sort of expression took over his features.

Beyond, now thoroughly fascinated, continued his observation in silence.

Mello turned a page, and his companion's eyes dropped guiltily in fear. Upon looking at the three of them with this new knowledge, and perhaps for the first time with his full attention, he realized they were not 'boys' or 'children' at all. In truth, they appeared to be merely a number of years younger than Beyond himself.

Young, yes, but certainly not children….

Children didn't know the meaning of lust.

A smirk spread his lips as he watched the silent drama unfold, the telltale drawing of the knees, and uncomfortable shift in the red one's tension. Beyond did rather the reverse, uncurling in his little corner as he rested his weight in his palm and watched, smirking broadly while the annoying one all but writhed in place. Lips parted, he appeared torn between his small game console and the more delicate distraction that Mello offered. The fire growled quietly, but beneath that, he thought he heard something of a whimper when Mello's tongue came to cleanse his lips. The chocolate withered in the heat of his grip, and if he didn't begin to pay it more attention, he would find it more trouble than it was worth before all was said done. Beyond surprised himself by trusting him not to be stupid enough to let it ruin the book.

They were all about the same age, Beyond knew from the rumors about the academy. Of the three of them, he supposed the red one was the only boy that truly looked his age…almost or barely fifteen, if Beyond placed him properly. Suddenly the notion of him playing games, and the white one playing with children's toys was all the more disgusting. A rustle of paper and another page turned, though the boy was careful to keep his head down. The hush of his breathing quickened slightly, and when Beyond lifted his eyes again to the golden boy, the notion in the back of his head ripped a stitch loose.

_Look._

A coherent enough thought, if one looked at it as plainly as something that was natural and should exist in the depths of his thoughts. Like a sliver of glass, his own humanity twinged most unpleasantly when Mello lapped softly at his candy. For a moment, Beyond considered the possibility that he knew the effect he was having upon his companion, but his eyes never once faltered in their movement. Pages turned, chocolate disappeared, and the boy upon the floor suffered blissfully in silence. Perhaps it was the need to punish the red haired boy for his past insults and noise, but Beyond suddenly wanted to shift into his line of sight and catch him in his stare, to humiliate him. However, when he began to pull his eyes away from the golden skinned youth abusing the other's sanity, his mind whispered again.

_Look._

It was unsettling, and he ignored it. Nor did he move from his place, choosing instead to see how long the fool could last before voicing some kind of protest that the candy received the attention, and not him.

The thought made him pause again, eyes narrowed and smirk curled. Watching the boy pull himself into a tighter ball upon the carpet, he began to look at it in a different light, perhaps. Despite his fervent glances and the red tint that hid his freckles from view, he doubted the red boy knew what it was he wanted from Mello.

The golden boy, not Mello.

It was at this point that Beyond realized he'd gone from 'yellow boy' to 'golden boy' and became even further irritated with himself for allowing the fools into his temple of solace to begin with.

…Regardless, the more he observed the frustration in the red one, the more convinced he grew that while this particular brand of torture was familiar to him, there had been no action taken on its behalf. While the exact extent of the red one's sexual experimentation was of absolutely no interest to Beyond, he found it hard to believe he'd discovered much more than masturbation at this point. Even that was dubious, considering the discreet pressure that he was applying to his…problem. It spoke of inexperience, excited fear, and frustration. Far be it from Beyond to interrupt his private tortures.

Instead, he remained sprawled upon his little bench, for once enjoying their company if for no other reason than to mock them from within the silence of his mind.

_Look._

His eyes narrowed, even as the other reached his breaking point. With a single glance at the carpet, he genuinely surprised Beyond with the firmness of his voice.

"Mello, you're doing that… thing again."

The following moments were crystalline amusement, in his opinion. Before his eyes, the picture of calm became a ball of horrified tension. A single glance between his companion's blank expression and the chocolate in his fingers was all the confirmation the he needed. Without a word, he let his book slide away and pulled the paper up to cover the treat, shoving it to the end table. The white one smirked over his shoulder, hidden by the fortress wall, and if Beyond believed in respect, he might have chuckled at the sight.

So…this was not the first time.

They said nothing more of it, the gamer pressing buttons and again escaping into his bright little world once more. Mello licked his lips in an almost self-conscious manner, thumbing after his lost page.

…Then with a sudden start, he lifted his head to stare at the older boy stretched in the corner. Beyond merely held the fire-stained gaze, his benign smirk still in place. Slowly, those eyes widened in shock as the realization of his multiple witnesses sunk in, and while his lips didn't quite part, his fingers shook slightly upon the paper in their grasp.

Without another word, Beyond straightened up, rested his chin on his knee and watched the golden boy for the next hour or so.

It was fairly easy to turn a simple meeting of the eyes into a touch.

_Look_, his mind whispered, and he abruptly shied away from that thought.


	2. Clairvoyance

AN- I tried to convince myself I could fit this into five to seven chapters.

_(I am the virus, are you the cure?)_

Self, I think you were lying.

_(I am morally, I'm morally impure)_

It's four in the morning my dears. I should be finishing that scene for Morning Star, so my beta doesn't kill me.

_(I am a disease and I am unclean)_

Anja, I offer this as appeasement. I've had a bad week.

_(I am not part of God's well oiled machine)_

XXXX

Chapter Two

_Clairvoyance- The alleged power of perceiving things beyond the natural range of the senses_

XXXX

Beyond, at the age of eighteen, was an extremely intelligent man. While it was uncommon for a boy with only eighteen years of life behind him to be considered an adult, there was hardly anything common about Beyond at all. He was of abnormal intelligence, so gifted that it was hard for him relate to anyone twice his age, much less his own, and the level of his maturity only made his relationships with those around him…difficult, at best.

…At least for them, because Beyond never really gave a damn in the first place.

It was arrogance. Purely and simply, it was his arrogance and his contempt that made his life easier to bear. To avoid the complications of human troubles, he merely removed them from the equation, refusing to associate with anyone or anything unless they served a specific purpose in his future. It was generally accepted that he was not to be disturbed unless circumstances were dire, and in a quiet orphan-academy in the English hills, 'dire' was a rare term. The teachers gave him the information they were paid to give, and he was left to his own devices. As one of the older tenets of the house, he was allowed full roam of the house, allowed where he was inclined to go, with only a few absolute restrictions. In truth, they were of little consequence, because had Beyond found reason to be where he was not supposed to, there was not a person in the academy tenacious enough to dissuade him from the notion.

…Aside from the academy's proprietor, but that was another matter, and completely irrelevant.

He rarely exercised his freedom, deeming that once he had seen a seldom-used library in the back corners of the large manor, he was not likely to see much change there. If he'd learned anything in the four years that he'd lived in the manor, it was that the purpose of the establishment was not change, it was grooming, refinement. As the second child to be collected in the six years since it was decreed a program, he had watched the flock grow from sets of twenty, to the small population of three to four hundred children that it carried now. They were tested, trained for a short time in general fields of knowledge and then tested again for a particular aptitude that unerringly fated the rest of their lives. The first test was a full cognizant review, of everything they had ever learned. The children were given thirty days to write a comprehensive report on everything they knew. It was not a formal paper, merely a list of all the information that they, as children, deemed important and knew from memory. They were given room and board and an endless supply of paper, for that first portion of the exam was handwritten. Anything, and everything, summarily an account of their lives, was scribed in small handwriting in pencil, ink or crayon, for later review. Those who didn't survive that portion of the test were moved on to other boarding schools, because regardless of their intelligence, they didn't have the necessary discipline or determination to bother wasting the extensive resources that would be passed on to them from that point. It was considered a waste of the establishment's time.

When and if, a child's paper was reviewed and deemed worthy of accepting, they were then given their choice of name. When Beyond had first arrived, they'd gone so far as to give them numbers, and leave it at that. The proprietor deemed that too cruel, however, and had them organized by letter, with a name chosen from that letter. It worked well enough for the first set, he supposed, because after he'd advanced through the trials and begun to show real promise, they allowed the children to take their own names. They had the necessary back-ups, so the superfluous residents were granted a leniency that Beyond had never known in those first, tortuous years.

After the child's name was chosen, and logged into the register, they began their training. In the beginning, the regime was fully comprehensive, covering any number of subjects, with the child's interests in mind. This narrowed the list substantially, because those who requested certain subjects and then accepted the ones they were given instead were immediately discounted. Those that refused to accept the training until it met their standards began working towards their goals immediately after challenging the system, while the rest settled into what life had given them and called it enough. Two years of general learning, classes and studies and projects and missionary examples to guide them, and they were subjected to the second test. By this point, most had decided what field they would specialize in, and this very select test was a comprehensive mental study of the children themselves, and not of their abilities. It was perhaps the most dangerous exam they would ever face within the establishment's walls, but it was also the only one in which the children themselves did not participate in. It was a full psychological profiling, a silent affair that determined the course of their lives more surely than their own choices ever would. It looked beyond desire and impulse, and into the very chords of their humanity to determine the type of person that they would become and how that person would ultimately behave… children often dream of being an astronaut, but a precious few are of the mental design to pursue that dream to its end. Instead of the ingenuity, the grace and beauty of a young mind left alone to mature, they would rather dissect the bird's wings feather by feather to determine if it was ever capable of flying to begin with.

A 'noble cause', they quoted, but in Beyond's opinion all they ever wrought was hell…for his generation, at least. One of them was already dead for it.

Beyond, however, was not as weak as that child, for a child 'A' had remained until the day that he died. Regardless, the grooming continued, and to this day, Beyond was still being shaped. A man as he was, he was treated with more respect, but the shadows of his training tainted his every thought, and caused the workers to drop their eyes in shame and admiration when he walked by. Beyond was the next in line, the best, and at the moment…the only hope for the legacy of L, the greatest detective in the known world, to continue.

It was a burden that he hadn't asked for.

Still, as a child, even a gifted one, his voice had been small in the ears of those more powerful than he, and so he remained in these halls even now, continuing his training under the lock and key of his proprietor.

…And sometimes, sitting in the window of his library and thinking of nothing didn't console him in his _rage_, and he would walk the halls, breaking his pattern to keep from breaking his control.

When Beyond walked, no one spoke to him. To see the young man in a section of the house where he did not normally dwell was a foretelling of something going wrong, and likely very quickly. Beyond's anger was like a scorpion, and while he didn't indulge himself often, he was unerringly cruel. Perhaps the greatest mistake that Quillsh Whammy ever made was to authorize the dissection of the young genius' mind and his fallacy to then show the boy the pieces. It was an interesting experience, no doubt, to know the darkest secrets of his own mind revealed and categorized into an accurate self portrait so intimate that some of it, he'd yet to even grow into. His entirely personality was torn apart and spoon fed to him prematurely. Even discoveries that he'd yet to make himself were scripted and laid before him in that report, all the private trivialities that composed his mental makeup in black and white. His sexuality, his eventual stance on religion, even his method of dealing with himself and his troubles… his very _identity_ was taken from him and then given back in ragged pieces.

He thought of repaying them all by confiding to them the day they would die.

…But in reality his fate was so much worse.

It was not within his power to change what he was to become. The code of his mind was written so early on in his life that he was no longer able to direct its course, the learning years of his childhood spent in a long line of broken homes and strange places. Everything, from his first steps, to his first cognizant interactions with people, were simply too far behind him to allow a change in the person that he'd become. He'd passed the stage of evolution that decreed what strengths and weaknesses he'd had to survive with. When they tore his mind open and penned its pieces to the white board for display, he found he had nothing to look forward to. There would be no real emotional growth, because he already knew how he would react in a given situation, down to a point and line _graph_ of the what-ifs and possibilities. Growing up would be like watching the doctor administer his lethal injection…he would know the process, the details of the drug and its influence, but no matter how he railed and screamed in the depths of his mind, the needle was damn sharp and he would never escape it. Even when the inevitable thought of fighting finally occurred in the midst of his panic, the drug would already be in his system, stealing the strength from his rebellion. He would die knowing that not once over the course of his lifetime was he a free man. Never.

…So when Beyond walked, he walked with the intention of venting. It often led to damage, sometimes to property, sometimes to the other children. As of yet, nothing overly serious had occurred, but his bouts of instability were notorious and he was often shadowed by one of the bulkier attendants, should the violence become personal. His discrepancies ranged from the minute, such as plucking the toy from a toddler's hands and setting it upon a high shelf, to the extreme, such as the occasion that he set a piece of paper on fire, and left it burn upon the carpet. They'd nearly lost an entire library's worth of books and knowledge to that fire. It was the event that earned him the guard.

His walks were not limited to conclusive actions. He did not always roam the house for insignificant troubles to amuse himself with. On occasion, he merely walked. One of his more recent endeavors was to merely stalk the grounds endlessly like a stray cat with mange. If left undisturbed, he would walk sometimes for days on end, until his legs would no longer carry him.

One thing that never failed upon these ventures is that he never spoke. Granted, he rarely did so anyway in his day to day encounters, but when he retreated into the gaping wound of his memories, he was utterly and completely dissociated from the rest of them. He would often pull away from life, leaving them to weave in and out of his field of vision, but when he walked, he disappeared. It was widely rumored that his unintentional meditation slowed his heart to a point where he simply couldn't respond to external stimuli, but as of yet, no one had developed the nerve to stop him in his wanderings and find out. When Beyond walked, the staff merely informed one another, and sent someone to watch the young ones while a man fell into step a few yards behind him if he looked overly agitated. He supposed that it was better they lock him up, but it was his understanding that the proprietor had undergone the same training that he himself had, and was also allowed his little quirks.

Honestly, he thought they were merely so ashamed of their handiwork that they didn't have the heart to punish him for their crimes.

XXXX

Mello didn't know why it was so damn fascinating. Years of being content in a form of stasis with himself and his surroundings had perhaps left him questing for an outlet to the stress he was storing away in the depths of his mind, but by all accounts, it didn't make sense. He'd been fine to ignore everyone and everything but his religion and his studies. His friendship with Matt was as rhythmic as the moon phases… they were always at each other elbow, and then they'd go weeks without speaking. It was at once a comfortable, easy companionship, and a tense pressure, a momentary flash of heat that lingered for days before it fled with the tide. An exchange of gazes would often left them unable to speak, and things would become strange again, until neither saw the point in seeking the other's company when all they did was confine themselves to an uncomfortable silence.

Matt was his cure. Matt calmed him, incited him, and calmed him yet again when he needed the reassurance of a mind at his back, a friend that he could trust implicitly.

But…Matt also wanted him.

In the gregarious, intimate way that boys want.

And it scared the hell out of him.

Something not quite desire or lust resided between them, tossed like a hot coal between the two and determining the sway of their relationship. Neither were sure exactly when it had begun, but it had yet to fade, and remained a mere tension in the framework of their exchanges. Young as they were, it was still something to be feared, something forbidden and something to laugh at themselves about.

But sometimes when Matt looked at him, Mello couldn't look back. Sometimes when Matt stared in that quiet way of his, and the laughter died off into silence, Mello wrapped his fist around his crucifix and marveled at the delicious heat the look imparted. Always, just in his peripheral vision, the magnitude of such a look hovered like the flicker of a candle. He could feel the shift in the other boy's breathing, and instinctively avoided his eyes, removed himself from their wrestling match in the floor, or started off, walking to force him to follow and pull his mind from the haunting tug that he was experiencing himself. Always, so easy, to walk away.

Because sometimes, Mello stared, and he knew that Matt walked away to save him, too. When the sunlight caught his eyes just so, and the blood in Mello's veins broke canter, he would pull his goggles on, and leave the…_want,_ in Mello's heart grasping at something beautiful and only finding smoke. When he was working, concentrating hard enough that the small line at the bridge of his nose appeared from his furrowed brow, Mello would watch, and Matt would hide when he noticed. Usually going to fetch them something to drink, or putting the project away for the night…and so it went.

A game of sorts, a daring little reach into themselves and tentative grasp at the men they might become some day.

At first, they never spoke of it, but as the years passed, it seemed to become more and more common. As the years passed, and shoulders broadened, bodies matured, and self-awareness came to plague them, the game became harder to play. The tension that rested just beneath the surface burned perilously close to the skin in the waning years of their childhood.

Until the day Matt shattered it and kissed him.

It was brief thing, because Mello had broken the rules. He'd felt the look, upon his shoulders while he worked at a report and Matt played beside him. The incessant ring of a paused game had long been repeating the stark silence, and he'd _known_. It seemed simple enough in the beginning to continue to ignore the heat, the tension curling up his spine, but now that things were different, his pen slowed to a stop against his will. They sat there, like that, for a long time. Simply breathing quietly and feeling out the depths of this new dynamic with the fumbling thoughts of two boys suddenly made terrified of themselves. The look didn't waver, but that was his fault, for not breaking the stare, moving, talking, asking a question….it was his fault for not pulling Matt away from his thoughts. It was his fault they continued licking over his skin like tongues of flame. He suddenly couldn't breathe, and the silence…the silence was too much. He wasn't sure what made him lift his eyes from his paper and slowly turn them in Matt's direction, but the other boy tensed so hard that he jumped, caught in his stare. He was doing the unspeakable, acknowledging this tension, making it real, making it matter.

They sat there for another moment or two, paralyzed by the magnitude that something as simple as a meeting of the eyes had come to bear on their friendship.

Then Matt seemed to remember why he'd been staring in the first place, and leaned over to press his lips against the curve of Mello's jaw.

It was nothing, less than nothing, he'd thought and fantasized about worse in the quiet of his room, but it was enough. It was enough to rewrite the game into something darker, something that it should never have become. Mello closed his eyes, and the touch was gone, hardly a blink in the course of time, and as brutal as a hammer to their relationship. It was chaste, scared, young, and if given time, he thought, dangerous.

It was amazing.

Matt had leaned back across the couch then, retreating to his corner and paler than Mello ever recalled him being. It threw his freckles into sharp relief, which made him smile, just a slight upturn of the lip. Small reassurance to the guilty parties, but it was enough to give them a grip on their relationship and to face it. Matt returned to his game and Mello finished his paper.

Something that important, something that life-altering, had been years in the making, he realized now. Small thing though it was, it was not the product of a moment's desire, but the slow burning of something that had outlasted the cold of ignorance and stayed with them for years. It was the culmination of everything, and the first step into the unknown.

It was…important.

Fist wrapped around his crucifix, he wouldn't go so far as to call it sacred, but the word seemed synonymous when he thought about it in the privacy of his mind. It rang nearly as true.

It was also nothing like this.

Father Forgive, but it was nothing like _this_.

XXXX

To call his steps a well-worn path would have been a lie. In truth, he only indulged his need to walk every few months. His path through the house was always random, sometimes taking him through crowded nurseries where the children parted before him like water before hot steel. Sometimes, he wandered so far from the house that he left the territory of the groundskeepers and walked through knee deep grasses, untouched by any lawn machine. It was a candid, straightforward affair, and its calculated arrogance is likely what made the venture so successful…he'd terrified younger boys to tears with merely a glance of his baleful expression.

He hadn't been walking for long. The staff had yet to pick up on his rounds, and he supposed that if he stayed to the back staircases, he could likely avoid detection for another hour or two. He wound his way through the halls, barefoot and silent and blessedly alone. While he probably hadn't seen this corner of the house in half a year or more, little had changed in his absence. The stark reality of his prison was that it served to mock him. What little things he came to wonder at in the majority of the house were cleared away, where here they flourished. Cobwebs and the small house spiders that were ridiculed and killed in the house proper stood as silent sentinels in its dark corners, irrefutably resistant to the human standard. Beyond had developed a quiet sort of regard for the creatures, something that bordered respect but fell short of it in light of the fact that they held little in the manner of intelligence. What attracted him to the spindly killers was the fact that they possessed only the tools they required to survive, and had perfected them to a horrific simplicity that humans were utterly incapable of mimicking. When asked to commit murder, the human mind would immediately reach for tools, not just for the capture of their victim, but for the act itself. When it came time for the death to occur, hardly a single person would want to commit it with their bare hands…and the few that did, such as Beyond himself, were considered sick men that should be locked away for mental discrepancy. Put simply, because the rest of society turned their nose at the thought of blood on his hands, they expected the common man to do the same. They shared an ingrained disgust for creatures as primal and unadulterated as the common house spider, likely because they feared what it represented. It seemed a lack of compassion in the modern day was as damnable as their cowardice would have been hundreds of years ago. Beyond thought that, if perhaps he ever did kill a person, he'd like to get his hands dirty in the process. While a person's life held little value to him, he felt their death was misunderstood. He felt it was not something that should be feared but merely something that should be _experienced_, like all once in a lifetime events. Beyond thought it would be rather hard to experience one's death if one were too full of fear and denial to know that it was happening.

As he trailed a smooth hand down the dusty stair rail to the second floor, his lips smirked around the jam packet at that particular thought. If he ever did, perchance, find an opportunity to kill someone, he'd have the courage to tell them they were about to die. Then the nature of his anger took over and despite the soothing taste of strawberries on his tongue, he knew that he'd also like to make someone _believe_ they were about to die, and then walk away. In fact, he knew that if it wouldn't lead them to 'find religion' or some other bullshit excuse for their own shortcomings, he'd have likely done it already.

He pulled the empty piece of plastic from his mouth and tucked it carefully into a pocket. His bare feet were nearly silent on the marbled stairs, and as he wondered again how long it would take for the staff to realize that Beyond was missing a class, and not in his dorm room. The first was nothing new, but it was the second that would lead them to a discreet search of the house. Another plastic jam packet slid from his jeans, warm with the heat of his thigh and blackberry in flavor. He paused at the landing to admire the dust on the decorative table and tear the corner off with his teeth. Soon another sweet, slightly more bitter on the tongue, made him smile and continue on his meandering path.

As he neared the landing on the second floor and glanced through the doors into the hall, he was hit with the scent of incense. He watched the students moving to their classes for a moment, mentally challenging them to enter the sanctity of his closed off stairwell, but none seemed to hear the crimson glimmer of his eyes. The scent became stronger, and with a frown, he glanced down the steps. His training pointed him in the direction of the railing, where the wood shone warmly in the sunlight trickling through strategic windows. The absence of dust and tell-tale dark rubber marks on the marble told him that while no one had joined him this bell, these stairs were not as desolate as he'd hoped. Regardless, he began his trek down again, leaving the hall and its quarry to continue without the taint of his presence. The scent grew stronger, a blend of herbs and spices that mixed with his blackberry jam to put him in mind of a thickly spiced pastry, something savory and bitter to be had with similar coffee. He caught himself going through the habitual description and shoved his personality further into the background of his mind, trying to stifle his grooming and reclaim his sense of self.

When he rounded the banister again, he was presented not with one set of doors but three. To the left of the stairs was a door that led to the hall on the main floor, lined with classes and the central offices. On his right, a brighter source of sunlight spoke of the grounds beyond, a door to the moor grasses…and directly in front of him was an older door, one with stained glass in its insets and a simple copper cross nailed to the hand-span of wall above it. His nose instantly curled, for the incense had an explanation. Wammy's had established its home chapel years before Beyond, or even the proprietor had arrived. It was reminiscent of the God-fearing England that had existed before and during the Second World War. Beyond wouldn't say that he'd avoided it, but merely that he'd yet to find reason to cross its threshold.

His opinion of religion was…not held in high regard by others.

He wasn't sure how long he'd been standing there, scowling at the old maple planking that made up the door and its frame. Beyond tended to lose track of time when he shoved his thoughts away and tried to merely exist aside from the cold coal of his rage. Perhaps he'd only paused a minute, but if so, he'd finished his fresh packet of jam much faster than he had the others. Regardless, when the door swung open and Mello stepped out, he tensed as though caught in the act of something.

Perhaps that's what made him angry.

In Mello's defense, he hardly did more than lift his eyes to meet the older boy's and froze. The scent of incense masked the chocolate and leather that Beyond usually associated with him, as did the calm, displaced expression upon his face. The usual spark and glory that hung in his eyes had deserted him in favor of humble reckoning.

For the first time, Beyond knew for certain that his eyes were indeed blue.

They did not catch the sunlight like they had the fire, but instead captured the entirety of his attention with the simple movement of blinking. Even the slight parting of his lips in surprise was eclipsed by the disappearance and sudden reemergence of those sapphires. The color hovered somewhere between the light and dark just as Beyond's hesitated on the line of black and crimson. A matter of lighting he supposed, but nonetheless, disturbingly real.

They stood there for a moment, and eventually Mello stepped forward to let the door close behind him. The small glimpse of the dim world of faith faded with a click, and left him with only the company of the boy that seemed so steeped in it that it painted his very face. The crucifix swinging from the younger boy's throat glistened in the sunlight, a sharp bronze contrast to the white-gold of his hair. Beyond's sneer only deepened as he slid the jam from between his lips and licked them carefully.

Mello jumped when he spoke. "You didn't strike me as the type to waste your time in a pretentious bid for solitude, trying to place yourself one step above the rest of us with fervent acts of repentance. Did you light your candles, and say your 'Hail Mary-s'?"

"I…." The sound of his own voice seemed to startle him back into himself, Beyond noted, and the pale lips snapped closed again while he considered the insult. The sapphires narrowed as he found a scrap of the spark within himself and sought to burn with it. "If you think so little of what I do here, I might ask you why I most often find you locked in a library in a…a pretentious bid for solitude."

The defiance sent a thrill through him that nothing else had been able to draw today. Not even his pondering of murder and psychological torture had yielded the rush that this boy provided with the mere act of lifting his chin and deciding to bite back. Beyond marveled at that for a moment, before rushing the emotion away for later study and leaving the husk of himself to continue the conversation. "And what did you repent today?"

"That is none of your concern." Mello bit off again, and the dark edge to his expression said everything that he himself did not.

Beyond's smirked quietly. "Not a certain habit, I hope. There is no shame in using your…_talents_ to acquire something that you want."

He couldn't have hit the nerve more solidly unless he'd knifed the younger boy in the stomach. Some bastard child of humiliation and rage marred the smooth lines of his face, and his voice took on a cold edge that Beyond rather admired in one so young. "It is not a _talent_, it's a habit that I should break."

"You obviously haven't come to terms with your sexuality, so I'll play nice and leave it alone." He drawled.

Fists clenched, Mello all but spat his words up the stairs. "That is _also_ none of your concern!"

"Oh you're absolutely right." Beyond murmured, bringing the preserves to his lips again. The line of the younger's boys throat moved with his every breath, whatever peace he'd gained from his prayer obviously shattered. He pulled more jam into his mouth and smoothed it away with his tongue before continuing. "Whether or not you decide to fuck your best friend is none of my business. My most _sincere_ apologies."

That particular insult struck a chord that Beyond hadn't been sure existed. However, the sudden shock of stillness in the younger boy's body said that yes, he'd touched on something sensitive, something worth prodding at.

"Shut up."

"Now, now, I _apologized,_ didn't I? Though, I must confess, I am curious." Beyond sunk his claws in, amazed to find that a person could simultaneously pale and flush. Mello seemed staggered by the fact that Beyond had even spoken to him; he obviously wasn't prepared for the exchange he was trapped in. "Have you ever done it to him on purpose?"

Breathless horror, almost a whisper. "What?"

"Have you ever…" Beyond let the words roll from his tongue, tilting his head in mimicry of innocent curiosity, "_taunted_ him…on _purpose_?"

Mello took a step forward, and Beyond chuckled. He'd never seen so much emotion on the boy's face, and all of it some delicious combination of embarrassment, anger, and just enough guilt to keep his humanity in perspective. This was the outlet he'd needed, he'd been waiting for, and perhaps if he pushed hard enough he'd get more out of it than he initially expected. He went on, stabbing into the molten heat being directed at him with pinpoint intuition and unfailing cruelty. "It wouldn't be surprising."

"Shut up." Mello snatched his eyes away, and headed across the small landing. There were scarcely eight steps between them, but Beyond had a suspicion….

"You seemed thrilled that I noticed, after all." He offered quietly as the younger boy drew near. "Does it make you feel powerful, to have his attentions on a thread?"

…He was faster than Beyond had given him credit for.

His training had forced him to note the lithe figure that the boy worked to maintain, but it was his arrogance that had taken it for granted. Perhaps he'd miscalculated the amount of false bravado that crucifix around his throat instilled. Mello drew up alongside him, as though to pass him on the stair. He pulled his fist back too soon, and Beyond had enough time to acknowledge what was about to happen before the gloved fist drove a path through his entrails and nearly reached his spine. The jam in his stomach rolled, sending a wave of nausea up through his chest, until he grit his teeth to keep it down.

The next few seconds were entirely instinctual.

He would like to say that he hadn't intended to hurt the boy…but even that would be a lie because had anyone asked him about it directly afterwards, he'd have thrown his caution to the wind and made some quip about attempted murder. If the staff of the house had managed to catch onto his walk and get a tail on him it would likely have ended much sooner, when the exchange of insults began. What he would have liked, in all honesty, was to say that his self control transcended this act of violence, that a mere flash of pain wasn't enough to push him over that edge even on his bad days.

That didn't seem to be case, and as the jam packet fell from his lips to the floor, Beyond experienced his ideal power for the first time. White hot, a sear of pain so real, so human that it pissed him off to know it was possible, even while it humbled his preconceptions of the boy in front of him. In the instant the sweet taste left his tongue to be replaced with the hot copper-bite of blood from the bitten tip, he was aware of everything in minute detail. B, his husk, his shell, his _walls_, were torn away and for the first time since he left his corner of the library, Beyond resided fully within his own mind. There was no dissociation from the sharp reality of that pain, a beat of truth in the listless pulse of his day to day life. With the slowing, flashing heat of it working its way up his stomach, Beyond's mind reasserted itself, and then completely shut down for a space of three seconds.

In which, he placed his large, spindly hand over Mello's face and _shoved_.

He could feel his chest working to draw air, but felt nothing. He could feel the pulse of his heart in his injured tongue, felt the blood filling his mouth, but not the warmth of it. As Mello's body moved back, much too fast, became airborne in the eight feet of air between Beyond's outthrust hand and the floor below, the only thing that registered in any detail were the wide blue eyes staring back at him.

Shock, fear, and pure blue.

The purest blue eyes that Beyond had ever seen, not tainted with silver or green or gold…only the sparkling shades of a summer sky captured in the clearest of diamond.

He watched those eyes until Mello hit the ground.

It was as though a void receded, fleeing his conscious thoughts like a guilty child. Like a ringing in his ears, the pain worked its way back into his mind and called him back to himself in time to hear the back of the boy's head smack the tiles. It was a thick sound, muffled only somewhat by his hair, but in the second that those eyes closed upon the bounce, Beyond came back, and watched what would forever be a shining moment in his history with the Golden Boy. He cleared the stairs completely, so hard did Beyond push him, and fell upon his shoulders in the sunlight from the door. He gave no cry of pain, only jumped slightly as the shock dissipated through his frame in a silent wave of energy and hurt. His crucifix landed by his hip. Beyond, standing over him, could still feel the warmth of his skin against the pads of his fingers.

-For three seconds, he'd had silence.-

Three seconds, and it was as though someone had shut off a tap in his thoughts, a full cessation of thought. It was a feeling that he'd been trying to achieve for years in the libraries, locking himself away in search of silence within himself. The sheer cognitive ability of his brain had stripped him of something as simple as an internal dialogue, and replaced with what seemed to be multitudes of people inside his mind. Every piece of information he could take in, he did so without discretion, without choice.

Those few seconds of clarity, to act for the sake of acting and admire it…. To stand above Mello's body, watching the way his chest heaved and his eyelids fluttered closed, unconscious or possibly dying…three seconds.

It was possibly the most arousing three seconds of Beyond's life.

He moved down the stairs carefully, unconsciously walking on the balls of his feet because the situation seemed so fragile, so delicate, that one misplaced movement would shatter it. He eased down the stairs, and he should have been checking for intruders, for witnesses, but he couldn't take his eyes off the form sprawled in the floor. It was dementedly satisfying to defy the common sense, the noise, once it came back. He was in control of himself now, and he would never regret any of this, regardless of how it affected the future. He reached the bottom of the stairs, but that did not end his descent as he slowly knelt. Placing his knees on either side of the black boots, he lowered himself further, until the cold tile was a shock to his palms.

Mello's eyes never flickered, and there was only the uneven, labored sound of his breathing to fill Beyond's ears. The pain in his stomach faded, but the tight coil of excitement did not. He felt his own heart in his ears, and realized that he couldn't remember the last time that had happened. Moving slowly, so slowly, he eased himself forward, the scent of incense and leather and chocolate invading his senses to quietly assault his common sense. He inched forward, until the darker things in his mind whispered that it would be sweeter to become even closer, entreated him to lower himself to lie along this young, vibrant body completely. He reined them in and watched the boy's face. Mello's eyes remained closed, his hair across his brow, his blond lashes watered and stuck to his cheek from the pain of impact. He heard the faint hitch and draw in his chest, could feel the heat coming off the younger boy's skin. His pale lips, only moments ago twisted into a scowl of anger, lay parted, revealing a fine line of white teeth and pink tongue below. Beyond did not touch the boy, not to move the intruding bangs, not to wake him, not for anything did he _dare_ to touch…instead he merely leaned to the side, brought his mouth close to the pale throat in the excuse of checking for blood beneath his head. He knew better, _knew_, because his eyes were closed longer than they were open to check the damage he'd done.

Mello moved beneath him, a faint sound of pain and a shift of the shoulder, centimeters closer to his mouth, a bare shoulder, round and trim and firm to the touch he was sure, and warm…

He pulled away, trailing his nose along the fine line of his jaw and refusing himself the contact through the tortuous motion. He was wondering what it tasted like when a door closed somewhere above him and echoed down the stairwell. Footsteps followed afterwards, coming down the track, and loathe as he was to leave his little experiment behind, he knew that his time was up. He eased to a crouch over his hips and gripped the boy's chin, shaking him.

Those crystalline eyes opened much too quickly.

He didn't have time to consider anything else before he stood, and eased out the door into the hall, leaving him there to either be saved or bleed.


	3. Clarity

Boo.

First Update in Four Years.

I kind of grew up. I hope my writing did too. I know my subject matter did.

Beta'd by Nilahxapiel. How's that for a gunshot memory? So, Shall we?

Step Lightly,

Mikanis

XXXX

Clarity: n. The quality or state of being clear : Lucidity

XXXX

Stalking, was the only word for this. He allowed it, though whether Mello himself was the target of his mind, Beyond wasn't sure. That silence, those seconds in the void, haunted him like a droning bell in the chaos that followed. There was something off, something wrong with the way those eyes had flashed open, and despite his effort to narrow it down and apply his lifetime of education to the matter, that silence kept tugging him off course. Every time he'd tried to retreat in the last twenty-four hours, all he'd found was…static.

Stasis wasn't working, and for a genius of that caliber to go so long without rest, without departure and dissociation, it was…frustrating. Beyond couldn't remember the last time he'd felt an emotion as strong as frustration.

Before Mello, at least, because there was still that spark of rage, flickering like a candle in the darker corners. It burned, waning and waxing again with the intensity of his thoughts, lulled into complacency at the memory of those sapphire eyes locked on his for the descent down the stairs, and flaring at the wrong line of muscle moving under that _ache_. Mello had _hit _him.

And Mello had a _name _now, didn't he?

His lip curled in the dark, toes tensing against the carpet in the shadow between the windows in the great hall. His tongue moved behind his teeth, sore from their harsh edges but no longer bleeding. Beyond paused in his steps; stopping just shy of the moonlight filtering through the towering glass that broke the monotony of the English night. Four more like it lined the great hall, interrupted only by the balcony casting a long line down its length, and the stairs that rose to the second story. In the quiet, the air seemed to breathe with him, like a current he'd interrupted that stilled with him to acknowledge the small hurts that lingered from the encounter. The light was discordant, silver and blue painted over every available surface, robbing the wood and fabric of all warmth from the day. It made him long for fire, but the boys had not come to the library, and upon finding it empty, the staff had not bothered to light the fireplace, nor fill the bin with timber so that he could do it himself. His library was dark, and it felt like a mockery of that…peace. Silence as a living thing was a friend of his, the only entity he'd ever dared to associate such affection with, and the dark shelves in the dancing light with the cool glass pressed to his arm was the closest physical state he could find to echo the static void in his head. When Beyond severed, it was for his sanity, and the general protection of those stupid enough to interfere with him. It was quiet, the wheels still turning, but slowed for contemplation without direction, for the opportunity to clean and dust individual gears and puzzle over things best left in the dark. The fire likened itself to that, constant motion and destruction for the sake of moving energy, to defy the problem of having too _much _energy, justifying it by simply existing. Beyond could never truly sleep without the static. Or so he'd thought, until he heard what real silence felt like.

It was peaceful. It felt like an ache in an old limb suddenly cut off, nerves severed so sharply that there wasn't time for pain, the shock swallowed it and left it…hollow. The beating drum of his mind ripped in half, the staccato of his heart stilled, the beast of his psyche pausing to breathe because those eyes were more hypnotic than any spider, than any brush of the wind over the moor grass of a frozen winter in the English hills; nothing, had ever, felt like that.

And now the static was driving him mad. Like a raging dog, but never so disgraceful, he wandered the halls, hunting for silence. Stalking Mello, or at least the idea of him. Looking for closure, for peace within himself, and had there been a way to stitch it back together, to glue those pieces back into place, Beyond wasn't sure he'd be content with it again. It was the illusion of peace, as apt and broken as the opportunity itself had been; the utter contradiction of it, the rage and the complacency melding into cohesion like they'd belonged together to begin with, like a poison that made him perfect…he wanted it again. He wanted to possess that, for more than mere seconds, more than the drop he'd gotten, sharp and sweet like blackberry and blood on his tongue.

XXXX

Three days. Three days and nine hours, and Beyond pushed open the door to his library feeling as though the rage and numbness were draped about his shoulders like a warm cloak. 'Dangerous' was a word mentioned a time or two in his profile, along with other titles like 'unbalanced', ' fractured', and 'psychotic'.

All of them referred to possibilities, they all were simply warnings of the direction his training could take him, but they trusted his intellect to be his saving grace. They trusted him to be too smart to succumb to baser instinct and cruelty. They desperately tried to believe it, at least. Seventeen and damaged and powerful in all the ways that could destroy a man from within, and Beyond was basking in it now. God, it had burned like a coal in his chest before, just embers waiting for the appropriate whisper of air to remind him that yes, he'd been alone and yes, this place had taken everything from him, raped his childhood in the name of the greater good, and the only thing that had kept him from _burning _it so far was the knowledge of the trite boredom he could have had instead. The simplest endeavors over analyzed, picked apart, he would have been a prisoner in his own mind if they hadn't taught him how to use it. Still, a font of rage in his chest lingered, growing with every course they added to his list of supposed accomplishments, waiting on another man to die before he was deemed of use. He felt like a bomb gathering dust, right there, in his time-forsaken little window, waiting for winter to pass into the warmth strong enough to chase the snow from the shadows.

Beyond told himself that he was better designed for the job than L was. They'd intended to teach him how to be unbiased, objective, and instead, he'd merely discovered that he was completely without compassion. When they'd started drilling the finer points of the law into his head, they'd tried to teach him right from wrong…but what use was that grayscale? What was the point when every wrong could be justified with instinct, and every right with the bearing of someone's pleasure? It was frivolous, useless...trite.

Like that damned bench…Beyond stopped, and yes, he'd been stopping in his tracks a _lot _the last few days. He felt trapped, his crimson eyes narrowing in distaste at the spot that he'd claimed for himself out of the whole of the mansion. He'd been unable to shut down, to think clearly, to sleep, to eat, to function, with the way that his mind was working now. Limbo was hellish. The rage kept him burning, kept him moving, tapped and rushing through his blood like black ink because he had so many years of it to draw from, but here…nothing to work with, no puzzles, no pleasures, no problems, just an endless rush of time moving past him with no chance of ignoring it now. The static he'd once clung to didn't dull his senses, it pervaded them, like a thick fabric held over his face. He couldn't breathe under the pressure. He couldn't function. They were lucky he'd managed to steer clear of the other children as much as possible, because this was the most prolonged walk he'd ever been on.

He'd had three seconds of peace. Just three. The boys had not returned to his library, and while the fire burned brightly now in the hazy silver and gold of a winter afternoon, he found himself asking what he wanted to do. What did Beyond want to do with his time, since he couldn't ignore it. He wasn't sure what had happened, much less whether or not it could be replicated, and considering that the initial encounter was summarily concluded with blunt-force trauma on a boy a third smaller than he was, Beyond highly doubted that someone would be willing to help him _experiment_on the matter. He could always set the bench on fire.

Something clicked, in his head. Bloodstained eyes moved over to the fireplace and the timbers within as his heart picked up slightly. If he picked one up and held it to the glass, it would fog over from the heat battling the chill beyond the panes. Water making itself known from the air, like peace had from the silence, materializing as though it had always been there, but just out of reach and unseen. Then the curtains would catch, white gauze fluttering away to ashes, thick white smoke curling over the shelves, and black, thicker, when he set the torch to the seat cushion and the organic material caught next. They'd lose a lot of books. Valuable tomes stored here, in the upperclassmen's library, all gone to ash. He wondered how long he could stand there, whether the smoke would drive him out first, or if he'd be discovered before then.

Beyond had no wish to die, but that warmth would be interesting, to feel the depth of the fire as a pervasive counterpart to the bitterness welling in his chest. He brought his eyes back to the bench, watching it char and crumble in his mind's eye, flames already licking the shelves where he rested his shoulders, smoke rolling through and under each row of books until the paper caught, hearing the wood snap. He took a step forward, bare feet silent on the carpet.

The impact was sharp. Something more solid than flesh could ever be drove into his side, so sudden that he thought he'd fainted when the room was snatched away from his line of sight. There was a weight on top of it, but the fall to the floor meant that bar forced every scrap of air from his lungs immediately, and he barely managed to get his forearm between his head and the rug before he shared the same fate as Mello. Which was likely the boy's intent. He heard breathing in his ear, something slow and measured as he picked his head up in time to see the golden hair flash in the fading sunlight, and those lithe shoulders draw back to drive the handle of the baseball bat directly into his temple. White, white static behind his eyes, and Beyond snatched at the wood with a hiss of breath through his teeth, because he counted it pure luck that Mello wasn't quite strong enough to knock him unconscious with a blow like that…yet…and not for lack of effort. His arm tensed, and pushed, and instead of allowing it to lock his elbows up like Beyond had intended, Mello used his resistance as leverage to stand and snatch it back out of his reach, freeing the weapon. He kept it in one fist, drawing a long arc to bring it crashing into the older boy's shoulder. It was bright and brilliant, and if he'd seen it coming and tensed, it would have done at least twice the damage. Next, he was driving a boot onto Beyond's hip to flatten him onto his back and swinging again, but the pain…brought him _back_.

Beyond blinked, and the static faded, leaving only the ringing in his ears as blood rushed to the initial blow and hazed the vision of his right eye. His arm snapped up and caught the bat just below the boy's grip, rolling the force of the strike through his arm to negate it and then trapping the wood in the curve of his elbow. Mello half crouched above him and stilled, caught when he refused to the release the bat, and caught again by the look in those dark eyes. True light, sunlight, though fading fast, washed them both, and in those few seconds, they were together again. Present and cognizant, and furious. He was, Beyond could tell, righteous fury lit those eyes into a shade of blue that he didn't think he'd ever seen before. His own were bloody and dark, like a smear on a brick wall, and Mello's gaze tightened when he saw it. He remembered that look, the immediate pain that followed it, and Beyond fully intended to remind him of the laws of cause and effect. He'd brought a weapon, which was fine…it made this even. Three days at least since he'd even laid eyes on the boy and it was already replaying in his head, the way those cobalt stones had widened and watched him , begging questions they already knew the answers to as they fell out of reach. He remembered that sound, the crack of his head hitting the floor and wondered if Mello had gotten a _fraction _of the same gratification when he struck him over temple. He hoped so. He got rather lonely in his head sometimes. It made it sadistically simple to drag other people into it with him, and his lips curled in a wicked grin as he stared up at the beautiful blue eyes he'd been itching to claw out for days. Mello faltered, Beyond did not.

Mello reacted, however, when Beyond twitched the muscles of his shoulders to pull the handle of the bat to his chest and break the boy's grip. He dropped, let both of his knees collapse to put his full body weight into whipping his sharp elbow into Beyond's face. It burned. Burned richly, deeply, cracked his head to the side, and it didn't stop there. He dropped closer, just followed him down to make himself less of a target and when his fist made another brilliant connection with Beyond's jaw, the whispers in his head started…talking. Electric shocks, stems of pain radiating through his head, bringing all thought to bear on his next step, his next move, grabbing the boy's wrist and driving his own elbow up, following the motion to roll them. Beyond was not weak. He was not small, and while he wasn't as lithe and defined as the body below him, he was still hard in all the ways he needed to be…and several that he didn't. When the momentum continued on and downward to press his forearm over the boy's throat, he earned a gasp and an immediate struggle to get his chin under the pressure so that Mello could breathe. It didn't work. Beyond didn't let it. He let his body rest laxly between the boy's knees, using his weight advantage to pin him. He caught a glancing blow to the top of the head and ducked nearer to his own arm to avoid more of them. When Mello's struggles took on a panicked note, seeking less strategy and more efficiency, and then further, when they degraded to the simple equation that getting Beyond _up_ meant getting _air_, Beyond slowly spread his arms and legs, forcing Mello's open at the joints with his reach. He pried the boy's arms up, pried that fist out of his hair and shivered, relenting just long enough to let him cough and inhale—

And he hit him. Sat up long enough to bring a ringing backhand across that beautiful face and watch his entire body seize in shock. His head whipped to the side, cheek crimson and hedging black where the tips of his fingers made the sharpest contact, and it was just a beginning. Just a taste. The rage purred, his eyes gleaming, that smile settling into a self-satisfied smirk as he brought his hand up again and struck him in the same place with the back of his fist now. That earned him a hiss, and Mello bucked beneath him, but he was open, and Beyond was heavier. His heart roared in his ears, his voice trapped somewhere deep in his chest as he struck him again—_crack_—"You surprise me."

Not a solid angle, not enough connection. Mello tried to throw his free arm in the way, but he was stunned, misjudged it, too slow—_CRACK_—

"_Nghn_!" Something flickered. Wilted, almost. Beyond tilted his head, his heart racing almost painfully in his chest, blood raging through its course because this was a taste of what he'd been craving, and hadn't realized it until it slapped him in the face. Blue eyes tinged red in the iris from the abuse turned back to him, still angry, still fighting, still….defiant. It was perfect. He wanted the fight. He wanted this, for the first time in his living memory, someone wanted something from Beyond that resided in his hands, and not his head. Revenge, perhaps Mello simply wanted to make this an even exchange of pain and it had taken him three days to recover. Perhaps Mello himself was waiting on a deciding factor to unhinge him, and it had taken three days for his rage to agree that retaliation was the only way to know peace…Dozens of options, all of them bastardized from the scraps of personality that Beyond had picked up over months of observation, from yellow boy to Golden boy, to the boy with a fucking _Name_….

And he'd come looking for Beyond. He'd laid in waiting here for how long, an hour at least…waiting for the older boy to come looking for his static and share this, to vent this incredible frustration because there it was, echoed in his eyes, a shared poison. Rage. It was in his shaking hands, his labored breaths, his coiled muscles fighting in earnest now, and Beyond didn't relent. It was nothing compared to his training. The full extent of the damage they were willing to inflict on him didn't extend to the youth below, there wasn't a need. They had their plan B, their back-up, they had _Beyond_. Why break the pretty things, when the wicked ones served the same function? The wicked things were easy to kill; who thought of slaughtering spiders after they'd served their purpose of clearing the flies. No one liked killing cats, too soft, too much of a heartbeat, too much will to live. They _liked_ living. They fought to survive. Beyond just fought to destroy. Mello fought him, his hips trapped to the floor, his body shorter and smaller and weaker, pegged in place by the older boy with ease, and there was a tense exchange of motion that ended with Beyond trapping both of his wrists to his chest. The fighting became panicked again, helpless and desperate as he was, and that spoke to the wicked things in his head that encouraged him to not just experience the rage, but to enjoy it. Go ahead and take his time. Drag this out and make it an opportunity to scrape the poison out of the shadows of his head, because it'd been _so_ long, and he was _so_pretty like this, with his lips swollen and his cheeks dark, hair sticking to his forehead and his nails digging wherever they could reach and tearing at his skin. Fighting to live. Fighting for control. Fighting for freedom. Such petty goals, if Beyond cared to think. His heart was drumming in his own ears, hissing deeper breaths from the depths of his chest and this was just…amusing. He'd brought a bat. He'd brought a fucking bat, like that was going to make a difference when Beyond finally got his hands on him. Dangerous. Unbalanced. Wicked.

_CRACK_.

Open-handed, insulting, Beyond slapped him. It drove the air out of his lungs and Mello fought to get it back but the pressure on his chest made it hard. His eyes watered at the pain. Beyond slapped him again, and Mello grimaced, forcing his teeth together, _again_, and he choked on the sound of pain, letting his head rest against the floor in hopes of creating a smaller target. Beyond tilted his chin up, and drew back again, meeting those eyes calmly, chuckling under his breath when they slammed shut in the split-second before the impact, anticipating it, bracing for it. His face was getting dark…not fast enough. Not evenly, either, Beyond had only closed his fist to one side. He adjusted, drawing further up the boy's body, and Mello tensed and locked when he realized his intent. "_Ah_!…f-fuck…."

He shook himself weakly, and Beyond watched those lips part to reveal a bright red wash over his white teeth, something cut within…he wanted to taste it. His own tongue was pressed to the roof of his mouth, still tender from where his own teeth had slammed shut when the boy came after him on the stairs. He paused, watching him breathe heavily through his mouth and swallow thickly to clear the copper taste, but he could smell the blood on his breath. He dipped low again, trailing along the line of his jaw, waiting for Mello to shake the impact and come back into his own head. He pulled away as those eyes cracked, just slightly, and froze. There…they didn't see him. That hazed look, that thick gloss of pain in them now _wasn't_ _there_ before. Before the blow, and after the fall. When Beyond, in his criminal musings, had drifted down the stairs chasing that ghost of silence, he was looking at what had been missing before he drew away. Mello had never fainted after the fall…he'd just…lain there. And let him come closer. He'd waited to see what happened next, whether he could get close enough to strike again, and when Beyond had knelt over his fallen form, come close enough that he could smell his skin…. "…I surprised _you_, too."

The haze cleared somewhat at the sound of his voice, but clarity was impure, under a thin haze of confusion. He didn't expect him to understand immediately, the pitiful look on his face spoke of ringing ears and soft skin that burned like fire. Beyond was slightly breathless, eyes roaming his features and the fan of his hair, breaking his concentration as he returned to those eyes after a moment and found Mello waiting. Slowly tensing underneath him, winding up either to the brace for the next blow, or preparing another attempt to throw him off, Beyond wasn't sure. Mello swallowed thickly again, shuddering at the taste, then he spoke again, through his teeth, "Get off me."

Beyond wrapped his hand around his throat, tightly, pressing his stinging fingertips to the line of his pulse. Mello panicked instantly, and he basked in that for just a moment before shifting to draw his knees under him. He wasn't cutting off the airflow, not quite, just…challenging it. Daring Mello to argue with him further, to force him to overpower him again, because if he kept stoking this fire, Beyond wasn't sure he'd be able to dampen it again before he actually hurt the boy. This was too much. This was close, closer than he'd ever allowed anyone to be in the longest time he could remember. Beyond didn't touch people, as a general rule. Mello shifted under his grip, his eyes hard and clear and it'd be…easy, to kill him, despite everything those eyes promised. The fight wasn't over. The war wasn't, and Beyond wasn't sure what the point of it was, but there was war, in those eyes, in the setting sun. The light had shifted from warm to grey with the coming night, the fire dancing more prominently behind them and leaching some of the depth of color from the younger boy's eyes. Beyond's grip tightened slightly despite himself, feeling that heart jump up to race under his palm, warm and fleeting and inexorable for now, because Mello refused to give up. Beyond might kill him, but he would have to fight to. Fight and work, and try…it would require an _effort_, those eyes swore it.

"Get off of me." That voice was husky from the damage, thick from the red tint painting the inside of his lips like a taunt. Beyond shifted quietly, drawing him up from the ground at his own pace, letting his eyes threaten an unbelievable pain to be dispensed if Mello chose to pursue the encounter. He allowed him to stand and released his wrists. Mello coughed, wiping at his mouth , letting his hair cover his face as he spat, and shivered in revulsion, tasting himself. Beyond was still trying to calm himself, not quite trusting the other to be still, when the next words ground his mind to a halt in surprise. "Do you…_always _get off on hurting people?"

Beyond lifted an eyebrow, confused, then slowly he took stock of himself, of his condition and…yes, his erection. That…ached, in the most delicious way, something he rarely experienced because the mental and physical stimulation required to give him a hard-on were…astounding, to say the least. The older boy roughed a hand through his hair, bringing his eyes up to watch Mello do the same and—

A furtive glance, and then the boy dived for the bat. Beyond reacted, again, he was learning to let it just happen, and his leg whipped up, snapping the flat of his foot directly into Mello's face with enough force to spin him backwards on his feet.

Blood spattered across the floor.

Beyond froze, feeling it warm on the top of his toes, heart racing again in his chest as he brought it back down to restore his own balance and watched Mello stumble into the couch, groaning deeply. His hands were shaking when he brought them up, catching the flow in his palm as though trying to put it back, and something had burst, something substantial if not deadly. It painted over his hands and ran down his wrists and forearms, something had finally given and torn under the abuse and the pressure. He knelt there, leaning against the front of the couch, an elbow on the cushions as he tried to shake the ringing from his ears. The sky was growing dark. The fire was getting brighter. The world slowed down as he turned those crystalline eyes back to Beyond, and the color faded completely into the firelight…and the quiet. Listening to the embers pop, his labored air as he struggled to stay upright, but the taste of the blood made him sick, and Beyond was jealous, and fervently rooted to his spot in an effort to regain some scrap of his _control_, but he'd fucking _hurt_ him…and now he wanted to _fuck_ him. Like a bell tolling, that clicked into place, desire of a brand he'd never contemplated nor allowed to even _mutter _in his head, was there now, smirking at him. He looked helpless. He looked perfect. The rage subsided somewhat at the slack in the other's shoulders, there was no more fight to be had there now, whatever peace he'd just beaten the boy into, the submission suited him. He took a step forward, but Mello's head rocked back on his shoulders as he struggled to reach the couch at least, hand still covering his mouth as he swallowed again to minimize the mess.

Down his chin, his shirt, dripping to the floor…

Beyond lost—Closed the gap between them to snatch him up by the forearm and it was thick and warm between their skin, like a third presence in room. Mello's eyes widened, and there, finally, was fear.

And silence.

A closed fist to the temple, and his body went slack in Beyond's hands. He didn't let it go, didn't allow him to fall to the couch or the floor, but to call it consideration would offer sanctity to demons that he'd only just met. He stood here. His grip was shaking. His…body…was shaking. He felt it, like some far off tremor that spoke of weaknesses and adrenaline, and a pain in his head that was getting louder. But his hands reached, and pulled the boy up. He heard nothing, thought nothing, moved as though he no longer quite fit in his body, touched the world through water, held this kitten with gloved hands, easy to crush before he ever felt the damage and heard the screams. The mind was empty. The void was deep, and black, and..peaceful.

He pulled him down. Took him to the carpet, his soft eyes closed and his face marred by fine bruises, he laid him down in front of the fire, glancing over his shoulder as his skin slipped in the thick dark fluid, black in the fire, metallic and warm and engaging. Mello had locked the door when he found him and startled him out of his revelry. Brilliant boy.

Beyond brought a finger to his lips, nibbling slightly, basking in the way he had…nothing, there, to think about. The blood was pooling under Mello's cheek, drifting slowly towards the fireplace, and his breath had balanced out to something steady, and deep, a rhythmic pace of deep, pained sleep. Beyond's tongue curled over his lips, forgiving the old wound in favor of the recompense he tasted there, stark and unsettling. Where was he now? Arousal, violence…and peace…states of being, not thought processes. Not thoughts. Not thinking.

He shifted himself down, stretching out behind the lean line of the younger man's side, one arm sliding over his body to pull him firmly back against his chest, hold him close.

And Beyond fell asleep.


	4. Candid

AN-

Posting this somewhat blind, since my messenger stopped working five seconds after Nilah finished reading it. So, if you note something, I will polish it later. Know that she will beat me with sticks as warranted.

Step Lightly.

Mikanis

XXXX

They woke together. Something not quite a sigh and not quite a twitch pulled them back to their minds in a slow breath, and he felt Mello attempt to tense in his arms before the rush of pain made him sink back to the floor with a groan. Beyond's arm was numb with the weight of his head, and he felt his breath spreading warmly over the back of Mello's neck like it belonged there, taking in the scent of his skin, sweat, and the cloying tang of blood. He'd taken a course based purely on the properties of blood once. His mind was already supplying facts, and the little shiver that ran down the young boy's spine spoke of the nausea he should be feeling, the way he drew in on himself, and that odd little hiccup—

Beyond didn't try to hold on to him when he pried himself away from the floor with a sticky sound and vomited blood onto the stone hearth. Too much ingested, coupled with his head pain…and the thought of head pain brought his own to the forefront, colors dancing in front of his eyes as he rolled onto his back to stare at the ceiling. Mello wiped at his mouth weakly, his hand shaking in the dark, and tried to move away from the acrid scent he'd just spilled. Beyond tilted his head slightly and tried to focus on his features, but they were blurry. His skin was pale in the dark, light from the moon outside highlighted the back smear across his cheek. The boy put his hand back to the floor, apparently dizzy, and snatched it away with a sick whimper as it landed directly in the gelled pool that had gathered while he was unconscious. He sat there, shaking, hiccupping again as he fought the bile in his throat down, and Beyond was rather proud of his nerve…that was a lot of his own blood to be confronted with upon awakening with a headache like that. His cheeks were swollen and dark, not quite puffy yet, but Beyond doubted he'd ever see them like that at all. Mello's well-kept appearance spoke of vanity, despite the way he was scrubbing the tacky black fluid off of his palm with his jeans. He drew his knees up, and sat there, trembling faintly, for a long, long moment. Beyond let him have it, taking in the quiet sound of his mind turning again, but ultimately…rested. That was a novelty. It was nearing…he didn't know the time? He blinked, staring hard at the mop of blonde hair now, because that _never_happened. He'd truly shut down. He'd slept.

And now he had no fucking idea of the time, how long they had been lying on the library floor. Mello seemed to echo the sentiment, glancing up for the first time and working his jaw slowly. Upon spying the white shirt and ghost in it, he turned, crouching on his hands and knees in alarm as he looked the figure over. Beyond's eyes glittered in the dark, but that was all he was going to get. He felt as though he'd run a marathon, after three days of constant motion and then…that. 'That' being the expression on the boy's face, something wild and wary as he took him into account, and not just the physical, the mental _damage_ he'd just witnessed in all its glory. He was…for the most part unharmed. Everything he'd ever learned told him that it could have been much worse. Everything they'd taught him about men like Beyond had hardly prepared him for a man _like_ _Beyond_. A predator, something to be feared, something that was outcast for good reason. Beyond watched Mello watch him, and didn't move, regarding the other until the tension in his frame eased slightly out of exhaustion and the kind of lingering soreness that accompanied that facial brutality. It was dulling his senses, Beyond knew because he was still having a hard time getting his eyes to focus. Not a concussion, but close. Mello had gotten his shots in before Beyond took everything away, his control, his freedom, his air, his blood…there'd been quite a bit exchanged, and the hollow, pale look in the golden boy's face spoke volumes. After a bit, Beyond stretched, his back popping eerily between his shoulders and down to his hips. Mello jumped and looked away. Beyond was beginning to wonder why when he spoke, his voice quiet and his words uncomfortably slurred, "…I need to go to the hospital wing."

No, he didn't, Beyond mused idly. He needed fluids, a vitamin shot, and some superglue for the lacerations in his mouth. He'd be fine. The older boy didn't voice any of those opinions, turning his eyes back to the ceiling and flexing his hands to chase the blood back into them. Mello waited, expecting protest of some kind perhaps, but he didn't get one, and his first attempt to stand didn't end well. He sank back to his knees, trying to wait the nausea out, and gave up, pressing his forehead to the floor and following it down brokenly, breathing in long steady paces to get control of himself. The smell wasn't helping, but Beyond didn't mind. Oddly.

They'd all taken classes on how to dress wounds with limited supplies…Beyond was almost positive that was the path he would take. His pride would win out. That just left the random pools of blood all over the library. Beyond found himself not caring if they tracked him down over it, either. Their attempts to counsel him had gone _so_well in the past.

XXXX

"I… think I want to kiss you."

"…No, Matt."

XXXX

Chocolate.

Pretentious little _bastard_.

His eyes narrowed tensely, but the candy did not move or disappear into a puff of smoke, as he'd expected. Beyond shifted further up the mattress to rest his bare shoulders against the wooden bed frame and stare bluntly at it. Of course he recognized it…and he did not sleepwalk. That meant that Mello had left it there, while he slept. He'd come into Beyond's room…taken the time to find it, and then, what? A peace offering? After an invasion of space…. No, a statement. He knew where to find him. Beyond tilted his head, an easy smirk gracing his features in the dark as he turned his eyes to the door. Mello had even bothered to lock it on his way out.

It was bold.

XXXX

He'd been thinking about him…despite his own best efforts. Beyond cut a forbidding figure when he deigned to enter a classroom, a spiralbound in his fist but never opened, his pencil tucked neatly behind his ear. He'd perfected various aspects of the L persona separately, working at each facet like its own equation. He didn't always choose to sit in the same fashion as the older detective, nor did he always go barefoot, or muss his hair, or fidget, or chew on his fingers…well, perhaps the last. Beyond had found that the habit of biting the tip of his thumb felt rather natural on him. He often practiced the detective's speech patterns, or smudged kohl pen under his eyes to mock the man from a distance. L never spoke to him anymore, but he was sure the rumors would get around eventually. It was all happenstance, whatever suited his mood for the day, and sometimes nothing at all did, but he rarely felt motivated enough to attend his coursework when those blank mornings dawned.

He'd been sprawled in the back desk of his entomological decomposition class when something had struck him…He wasn't practicing, because he wasn't bored. He'd narrowed his eyes at the screen, nibbling keenly on the skin between his teeth as he hid his mouth with a fist. A majority of his assignments for that class were already done, and the lectures were worthy of notes, but he hadn't bothered in at least an hour. Instead, he'd found his attention turned inward again, but not to emptiness, and not to casual destruction.  
He hadn't been picking apart his life and the academy and profiling every student in the room for the most opportune ways to insult them. He'd…been thinking about the line of Mello's side under his forearm, the small dip just near his hips that wasn't there when he stood. The curve of his back and shoulders. The way his hair and skin had smelled, inches from his lips. The way his blood had felt under his fingers when he lifted him from the floor. Mello.

The golden boy. The yellow boy. That fucking idiot.

Beyond had spent most of the morning like that, staring into the empty space between the projector's screen and his desk and soul-deep in the memory of the weeks before. It'd been weeks, too. Despite the fight, and the chocolate, he'd heard and seen nothing of the smaller boy, dully concluding that the chocolate had been a peace offering after all.…until about four that afternoon, when he'd entered the library to find Mello's book there.

And the jam packet that he'd marked his page with.

Something wicked had been purring in his ear all morning. Something that he didn't recognize, had never had to bother with until those damned boys had shown up and shaken the world on its hinges. But he wasn't bored, no, not that morning, picturing the golden silk wrapped around his fist and the long line of his neck bared for abuse. He wasn't bored wondering what other tones that voice could pull, because he'd heard the pain and desperation, and those were so close to _other_things, just a hair's difference and with the appropriate encouragement? Wicked. Twisted. Not what Beyond had expected of himself. Then again, Mello seemed to delight in being unexpected.

Personally, Beyond abhorred being predictable, but this wasn't his game. He wondered idly to himself how long Mello had been planning this second encounter, what he could expect from it. Escalation seemed stupid. He didn't want to kill the boy, or maim or …strike that, he thought, smirking to himself in the dark, he could handle scarring the boy. He wondered how many nights it had taken Mello to start sleeping in his own bed again, whether he'd lain awake and watched the door for the barest hint of movement, jumping at every pass of wind or perhaps sleeping with the light on like a frightened child. That would be amusing. But no light gilded his eyes when he turned the handle fractions of an inch in every minute, until it would yield no more. There wasn't any sound at all coming from the other side of the door, no scream of terror or rustle that betrayed an ambush. He still took his time, savoring the moment where he'd decided that he would play along. He wasn't bored. This was _fascinating._ There was something aside from the static in his brain and perhaps further opportunities to find that blissful silence again. Beyond couldn't turn that down after years of being trapped like he was, and the golden boy kept finding ways to tug at his imagination. He'd never done this before, but it promised to be _so_ interesting. His heart lit in his chest as the first scrap of space appeared between the door and its frame, almost invisible but to his keen eyes, with the way the shadows clung to each other and were almost indiscernible. If it weren't for the reach it had required to move it that far, he would still think it closed. A quiet piece of his mind wished Mello were awake and watching, letting the night play tricks, second-guessing himself in fear. But he'd been shown otherwise. Mello was bold, and while he probably did lose sleep over their last encounter, fear wasn't something he dispensed with change. Fear was something that Beyond had to _work_ for. The escalation between the stair case and the library seemed a stretch from an objective standpoint, but Beyond was hardly looking for an objective _anything_. In fact, the fewer people that caught on to this little charade, the more time he'd have to enjoy it. He dimly hoped that Mello had managed to play off his wounds as a consequence of a heated sparring match and not…an attack. And when was the last time he'd _hoped_for something?

He slipped his tools back into his pocket and hesitated with the motion of the door, pulling his pocket knife out instead. Peering carefully at the space, he waited for the clouds to clear briefly and silver light to creep across the bedroom floor to show him where to start, and after a breath, it did. He placed his blade through the crack with the flat down, tracing down to the floor and smirking broadly when he felt it catch on a trip wire. He slowed immediately feeling out the tension in the line until he managed to ease it under the edge of the door and widen the gap enough to see. A thin cord, fabric and not wire, ran from some secured point behind the door frame across the room to his…bedside. Attached to his alarm clock. Opening the door would have sent it clattering to the floor and woken Mello from his sleep. Interesting.

And not electrical. Beyond reversed the blade and the thread fell cleanly. He ran it the other way as well to be sure, but encountered no other safeguards. When he pushed the door open with his fingertips, a chair came into view, and he had the sudden, vivid image of Mello snatching the clock up to kill the noise in the mornings and pitching it across the room to land there, freeing the door in the process. He gave a silent chuckle, surveying the room quietly to make sure that Mello was in fact in it and not waiting to launch at him from a dark corner. The figure under the blankets fit his profile however, what Beyond remembered lying in the floor with him, and another pause was warranted still, until the body beneath the blankets shifted gently in his sleep. That was a living being there, the one that had been creeping through his room, his things, and his mind. Beyond closed his knife and clipped it back into his pocket. He could barely make out the ball under the covers, a shock of moonlight showing the tip of his shoulder and the curve of his ear, his hair draped under his chin.

The steps across the carpet seemed ethereal. A faint chill swept over his bare feet from a crack in the window, letting in the cold from the fading winter outside. It was late enough to be early, but Beyond's classes started late in the day, and he didn't really care about Mello's. He moved fluidly, rolling his feet to be silent with his thumbs edged into the pockets of his old jeans, still ready for a violent reaction. The game wasn't speaking of violence anymore, however, not blatantly at least. Curiosity was a better word. Regard and perhaps respect, from the younger man. Mello came awake with a deep breath as Beyond's shadow moved across his face. A light sleeper then, something that might save his life one day. Perhaps even from Beyond. It was a quiet affair, his eyes closed for the last three steps, and open when the shadow passes, glimmering gently in the moonlight from the guard of his arm as he watched the older boy reach the side of his mattress. Beyond sat near the foot of the bed, out of damaging reach from kicks and too far to engage in any way, really, without turning to sit up. He left one foot on the bed frame, curling his other leg in front of himself and bracing his arms on his knees, watching.

Mello chose not to move at first, and Beyond almost missed his words in the quiet of the night. "I've been in your room four times."

Honesty…and a little insulting, truth be told. Beyond didn't raise his voice at all, the sneering edge tempered by his own curiosity with the glint of blue watching him, "Are you bragging?"

"No…", and that sounded true too, "I'm just…curious. You lock the door, but you don't bar it."

"I don't have much to hide."

"Everyone does. Privacy is…paramount, especially in a place like this. It keeps us sane." Mello shifted up slowly, bracing on his arm.

Beyond just repeatedly softly, "I don't have much to hide."

Mello's eyes narrowed at the statement, turning to place his…bare, shoulders, against the headboard. Beyond looked him over quietly, knowing his eyes were too dark to be seen, but watching him swallow anyway. He didn't move to push his hair out of his face, and his crucifix hung from the corner of the wood behind him, and yes, Beyond liked it better there…both of them. He let his fingertips rest on the blankets, wondering exactly how much clothing the boy had on underneath them, dark gaze roaming down to the point where skin disappeared without apology. He felt that look , glancing nervously at the door again, and his clock still in its place. Blue eyes snapped immediately to his pockets, noting the type of blade and its location. He licked his lips before speaking, still eyeing it, distrustful…but it wasn't what Beyond expected him to say, "You're the only person I know that…_cuddles_, after a fistfight."

"Really?...Because you brought a bat, to a …'fistfight'." Beyond chuckled, smirking at him.

Mello smirked too, "I guess I challenged the shock-value."

"I think you gave me an _excuse_." Beyond drawled, clicking at his nails with the corner of his thumb and watching his expression. "To do whatever the fuck I wanted."

Mello hesitated, smirk fading.

"And I don't think it ended the way you anticipated." He added as an afterthought, feeling the light drift over his shoulders. The wind hissed through the window and Mello's eyes shifted, no, his _body_shifted with the cold. The dark places in his head were paying too much attention, recalling that slick feel of his blood and how warm his skin had been underneath it. That skin, just there, resting on the edge of the blanket. That was the arm he'd picked him up with. Beyond wondered if that had bruised as well, or if the marks on his face were the only trophies he'd walked away with. He pushed gently, "But you didn't go to the hospital wing, like you threatened, did you?"

"It wasn't a threat." Mello offered quickly, an offended tone lacing the statement. "Do you really think you're the first to beat me in a fight? I made it back to my dorm and realized it wasn't as bad as it looked. Just…"  
He gestured, and Beyond's eyes were drawn to his fingers, "Some unfortunately placed pressure."

"Unfortunate." Beyond echoed musingly. "Hm."

There was a soft pause and Mello drew his knees up, tilting his head and replying, "You…knew that I wouldn't, though. Never doubted it. What you're really asking is what I've told people about it. Whether I've brought you into question."

"If they'd wanted to question me, they'd hardly need an excuse like…you." Beyond pricked a hole in his ego, and Mello's eyes flashed. It was attractive. There was a lot about this boy that he was coming to define as 'attractive', with or without the blood. Like the way he licked his lips when he was thinking. He lowered his head, and his voice, considering the amount of space between them blithely, sliding his foot forward along the bedframe support. "No, what I actually want to know is what possessed you to bring this…here?"  
He glanced up and around as though seeing the room for the first time, his eyes cutting back to Mello sharply, watching him through mere slits, because he was a predatory personality, and this played into that very well. That was the truth. And he knew Mello was going to lie. "What were you expecting?"

"…I don't know."

"Liar." Mello grit his teeth, but Beyond pressed, watching the clouds throw shadows over the expanse of wall behind him. "You don't _fail_to think ahead. You've shown me that much. There was a point."

"…Conversation." Mello drawled, and it was too blunt to be dishonest, and too clean-cut for his pride, his tone acidic as he added, "I was wondering if you were actually capable of it, considering all I've ever heard from the supposed 'star student' was a string of poorly laced insults factored around his scrap-knowledge of my religious habits. I _study_, in the chapel, you asshole. It's quiet, it's mine, and not too many people of our caliber bother with religion, so it's fairly private."

"Oh." Beyond turned his chin back, eyes narrowing coyly as he regarded the tension in the younger man's face. He was still lying, but he at least believed most of what he'd just said. Interesting. "So emotional. You know, the problem with having feelings is that feelings can be hurt."

"You _are_ human." Mello sneered, crossed his arms against the chill and the goosebumps spreading over his skin. "Despite how fucked up in the head you are, whatever delusions you entertain, you _have_feelings. I've seen them."

He was so arrogant. Genuine amusement blossomed in Beyond's chest. He'd never claimed not to, he was making stereo-typical leaps based on generic profiling, he hoped that they spent more time with the future prodigies than this, because he wouldn't last a year in the field like that. "Have you? When?"

"When…" And he suddenly realized those words didn't want to come out now, did they? "…you hit me."

"Ah." Beyond smirked again, lifting an eyebrow, "What an interesting conversation _that's _going to make."

Mello shifted, crossing his legs and bracing his elbows on his knees, staring dully at the floor. "I'd rather—"

"Not?" The older student cut him off, ducking his head to the side to catch those eyes and bring them upright again, because he wanted the contact, the attention. Mello was the one who'd gone out of his way this time, the one who'd teased and poked and prodded at his head to make sure he was paying heed, now he wanted to know _why_. "That's a shame, because we don't have much else to talk about, do we? That's why I'm here. Why you _wanted _me here."

They fell quiet for a long minute, the golden haired boy retreating into his own mind for solace, and Beyond himself taking the opportunity to consider moving closer…and that he wanted to be closer. He wanted to make him uncomfortable, fuck with his head a little because he owed him five months of it, ever since they'd each discovered the other existed, it had been nothing more than a distraction. Mello claimed he'd seen his _feelings_, wasn't that sweet? What was the point, if he even had one…of course he did. It was the _training_ that had taught him to put those in a box, and it was hardly Beyond's fault that he'd promptly lost the box. Talking to Mello, toying with him and prodding at those emotions he wore so plainly, it was like taking a new action figure out of the package and lining up all the extra bits he could exchange. He'd never intended to catch his attention, never planned to become a fucking puzzle again, to anyone, but the way Mello chose to play his game was by far the most gratifying in his experience. That defiance, that rage, allowed him to express his own, and that little box of humane things he'd once had locked away in his head was just drifting in a great, deep, _well _of rage. It burned like a pit in his chest, in his head, it whispered in his ear when he cared to listen and sometimes when he didn't.

"Dissociating has given me some illusion of sanity…not a delusion of grandeur. Trust me, boy, you don't quite understand the depth of 'our caliber' yet." He offered quietly, giving in to his temptation and curling forward over the blanket to mimic Mello's pose, blatantly within reach now. Silver-cast eyes widened, pressing back against the wood again as he locked up. Delicious. "But you'll grow into it. They'll force you to."

Mello bit it off, wary and sharp, "I'm not looking to fight."

"Aren't you?" Beyond answered curiously, and his hand snapped up and tapped his fingertips against Mello's cheek.

Two things happened immediately, Mello's arms flew apart, the top catching his wrist sharply and applying a small-joint manipulation hold that made his fingertips go numb, and the other reappeared from the depths of the blankets…with a knife of his own. Beyond caught it, though barely, eyes flashing with adrenaline as the serrated edge caught the collar of his shirt and opened it, stopping just against his throat. They froze that way for a long moment, Mello's eyes flickering between resolve and a nervous tension that wholly suited him, Beyond was coming to understand. He wouldn't kill him, Beyond was betting his life on it, uncurling his legs to maintain his stance over the younger boy. Mello realized that Beyond had never intended to hit him with any force, and regret tinged his voice as he started, trying to pull away—"Look, I…"

Beyond twitched forward sharply, testing his hold and cutting his words off with a gasp. "_What_? What did you want? To get inside my head? Figure me out?"

Mello shivered, and it had nothing to do with the cold this time, the older boy was sure of it, his dark eyes roaming without regard for his embarrassment, the look an invasion that he made no apology for. Beyond lowered his head, looking at the knife, but he refused to drop it, and the older student started to slowly tighten his grip on that wrist into something vise-like and painful. He lowered his voice again, letting the wicked things speak instead, "Because it's dark in here. And quiet. And cold."

And he was talking about the _bedroom_, but Mello's breath caught beautifully at the supposed drama, so he didn't clarify. The hands trembled once in his hold, as though Mello meant to shove at him, but the act never materialized with strength.

"Why did you bring me _here_?" He lowered his head again, talking right against the boy's ear, feeling his hair brush against his lips and letting his voice be heavy. Mello fled from it, wilting into nerves and tension as he crept down, sliding away as much as possible, as much as Beyond would allow. "Tell me what you _saw_, boy."

"…you…" It was quiet, and breathless, and the hand holding the knife weakened finally. "…I thought. For a second."

"Me." Beyond jerked it, a bitter motion that send the knife clattering between the bed and the table beside to fall with a muffled thud to the carpet, out of reach, out of his throat, out of Mello's saving graces, and Mello bucked for real this time, rolling his shoulders and abandoning Beyond's wrist to shove at his chest. Beyond simply took it, forced it down, something sharp and warm tinting his vision. He held him there, pausing to look at him again, take this into account for everything that it was. This image was one of many that had flickered through his thoughts over the course of the day, deciding that yes, he would answer the taunt in the library and remind the boy of his existence…

No, of his _presence_. Mello stilled, his heart a rabbit-scream under Beyond's pulse, his body tight and tense, chest moving slightly with every breath and waiting, because this…wasn't a place he liked being. His eyes distrustful, his hair trapped oddly between his head and the pillow, but he'd gone down, and the older boy let him, kneeling over his hips and watching the panic abate into something measured. At least he took the time to _think_ when threatened. And Beyond hadn't _threatened_yet. He'd merely reacted. His heart was up too, now that he paused to notice. He'd spent a long time learning to ignore the physical as a part of the world that he didn't want, back when he didn't know what wanting meant. But here, in the dark, Mello stared up at him and made him question. He was interesting. He was bold, and yet shy, right now at least, when he knew he'd lost. No, given up. This was the third time that he'd yielded to him, and for what reason, Beyond didn't know, but he wanted to shake him and make him realize that was idiocy; that was dangerous. He stopped, crimson eyes bright, every beat of his heart like a pulse of power through his skin, feeling his shirt hang loose around his neck from the torn hem, the way every breath Mello took brushed against the skin of his throat as he hovered like this, and how…warm, the body beneath the blankets actually was. This tension was hesitating on the line of something blasphemous, he read it in those blue eyes trained on his features, waiting for what?

For him to duck his head…trail the tip of his nose along his chin and deeper, inhaling the scent of his skin in its purest state, clinging to the pillow and emanating from him, almost as tangible as the boy himself, almost a taste in the air. Mello shivered deeply again, and when he pulled back, those eyes were closed, those breaths slightly more erratic. "When did you see _me_?"

That voice had a husk to it that he tried to clear, turning his head to the side to stare at the wall. "When I hit you."

A sharp edge of Beyond's nail brought those eyes back, they cut at him, slightly narrowed, not quite hissing in a breath, "You looked at me. I can't…describe it."

Beyond could. "Like clearing water from a mirror."

…Mello nodded, eyes roaming his features, then closing again. Intimate. The word clicked into place like it had been on the tip of his tongue for weeks, and it had. That was the issue here, not the violence, not the interest, the intimacy of it was the source of the trouble. It was the warning bell tolling in his mind that said no, there was something off. He was too close, he was too deep, already. They were speaking. Beyond couldn't remember the last time he'd _had _a conversation. "And you wanted to see me again."

"…You're not like anyone else that I've ever met." Mello offered, eyes still closed, because that was true. Beyond heard it in his voice, "In all the wrong ways. I…want your attention."

Those eyes opened again, catching his in a hard stare that Beyond didn't flinch from, running his statement over and over again in his head, biting back on all the screaming signs of a bad idea. Mello met his eyes and asked, "What do you want?"

"Peace."

They took a breath.

"…Can I give you that?"

Beyond shifted then, loosened his hold on the younger man's wrists, because he wasn't trying to run anymore, and he wasn't sure how that had changed. He met those eyes, let his trail over his finely crafted features and back…even battered, he'd still been beautiful, still been a more perfect model of sanity than Beyond could ever hope to mimic. The dark corners growled at him, the chill creeping across the stripe of skin exposed below the hem of his shirt from the stance he took, and he didn't shake his head. He gave voice to it, growling too.

"No."

He released the wrists, straightening again and glancing at the door. It was time to go, he needed to—

Mello's hands found his hips. Sitting up slightly to reach, the boy stared hard at him, his grip wrapped around the line of bone beneath his jeans and thin pale skin beneath that. Needed to what, exactly? Run. Get out, get perspective, get a grip on his once tantamount control before it dissolved into tatters. He'd lost that, however. He'd lost it when Mello fell backwards and a left a bit of his life on the floor, when he'd looked at him dazed, when he'd looked at him at all, and he hadn't asked him to just come here—

He was asking him to step back into his own head. To reside there fully, and _look_at him. He was asking with that expression, the tone of his voice, the way that grip shifted and his fingertips brushed over skin at the hem of his an afterthought, the other dipped to pull the knife out of his pocket and toss it out of reach. Beyond stared dully. This was…stupid. And tempting. And offered.

He needed to fucking _go_.

But a hand shifted, finally, a faint shake betraying the confidence of his blank expression as Mello's hand slid beneath his shirt to feel the taut skin of his side and over across his lower stomach. He watched him, carefully, waiting on the older boy to stop him as he lifted it and fractured Beyond's self control in its entirety by leaning forward to press his cheek there, his arms slipping around the slender hips to embrace him. Beyond didn't want to pet him, he wanted to take that confidence and chew on it for a long time, savor it before he shattered it, wanted to wrap his fist in that beautiful hair and put him on his toes…or his knees.

Mello didn't want him to leave. So he didn't. He waited, stiff, listening to the steady drone of his heart and deciding his lines. His hand found the curve of the boy's shoulder and pushed, until he let go, then he shoved him sharply back to the pillow. Mello's hands lingered, fingertips painting down the lines of his thighs as he waited, but his eyes widened as Beyond found the hem of his torn shirt and pulled it up over his shoulders. It fell to the floor and Mello's breath froze in his chest. His hands lifted, and the older student resumed his grip, forcing them down to the pillow on either side of his head and looking at him, static fading as he concentrated on those eyes. Mello faded a bit, shifting in the hold because he wasn't sure he liked being there, but Beyond didn't give a damn, the terms were his. He made that clear. Mello didn't know what he was asking for, and tearing at Beyond's walls blindly would do nothing but damage, _end_ in damage. They had to be careful. _He_had to be careful.

Slowly, so slowly he was sure the clouds were moving faster, he shifted off of his knees and let his weight stretch out along the length of Mello's, sinking down to his elbows and burying his nose in the boy's throat. There was a start, an immediate reaction and a gasp, Mello tensing in his grip like he'd been caught. He was warm, soft skin pressed against his chest, and Beyond let himself breathe deeply, holding those wrists despite his tension. His hips shied back, pressing against the mattress, and the older student started to pull back, but chose to simply follow instead…and Mello curled from head to toe. His legs drew up on either side of Beyond's hips, because caught turned out to be an accurate word, and Beyond's eyes flashed, wondering exactly how much of the conversation Mello had been aroused for. He felt good, underneath him like this. He fit, as small as he was. Mello shifted his hips again, pressing against him through denim and the blankets and the buzz in the back of his head threatened to grow into a dull roar, but he wasn't prepared to let that go yet. He doubted another instance of spilled blood would go without consequence by the staff, and Mello wasn't biting on the violence tonight. Beyond wouldn't let him. The younger boy tested his grip, sighing in frustration, and Beyond set his teeth to the boy's throat harshly.

"Don't." Mello stilled instantly. The obedience was gratifying. Beyond let his wrists go, sliding his hands to the mattress and then beneath the boy's shoulders, settling like a python over his lithe frame. "Go back to sleep."

He'd deal with that later, when he was sure he wouldn't kill him in the process.


End file.
